One of my first posts in this blog was regarding the servicing of the Pioneer PL12D turntable, and that has proven to be the most popular by a significant margin. The Pioneer PL12D had its competitors, and probably the most popular alternative was the Trio Kenwood KD-1033 turntable. I use both names (Trio and Kenwood) as the company operated under different names in different markets. In the UK they were Trio, possibly because the brand Kenwood was most famous here for food blenders. 95% of a KD-1033 is similar to Pioneer PL12D, and servicing them is very much the same process. Both are belt drive , have an AC synchronous motor, mechanical speed change , a main bearing, sprung top deck and rubber motor mounts. the KD-1033 uses a different type of anti skate mechanism, employing a thread and weight. The plinth is shallower with an internal cross brace. One aspect that is different is the design of the main bearing, and servicing it is a little harder than a PL12D. The ...
My Son was kindly given an Xbox 360 a year ago by friends who returned to the USA. It's been great but in May it died, suffering the red circle of death problem. This is the Xbox equivalent of the PC "Blue Screen of Death", though is actually worse, as it indicates a hardware problem. The Xbox 360 has a very powerful dual core processor and onboard graphics, and throws out of lot of heat through two case fans at the back. When running a game, it resembles a fan heater. Some of the problems appear to be heat related. This is well covered elsewhere on the web and I don't intend to discuss it here. Microsoft have extended previous warranty to 3 years. We got ours repaired by Microsoft and it's up and running again fine. However I decided I'd try to avoid this happening in future by improving the cooling of the unit. I did not want to open the 360 as this will void the warranty, which still has 2 years to go. I looked at commercial 360 coolers, and these seem to ...